Eleven Days (26 page)

I wandered back into the ER area, and Henry saw me for the first time.

“You want blood?”

“Yeah, from the one in the blue jacket.”

“It’ll be a few minutes.”

“That’s okay.”

I sat down on one of the chairs in a little waiting area and began filling out an implied-consent form. I saw Lori standing in the hallway, so went up to her and asked her if she could get me the driver’s license from the blue-jacketed driver.

“Could you ask somebody else, please? That’s my cousin.”

“Sorry …”

I saw an EMT and asked him. He got it for me, and I sat back down, filling in the blanks.

Most of the victims were in their late teens or early twenties. They usually were. I completed my form and started nosing around the ER area, picking up the names
of the victims. The girl we had tried to save was in an exam room, with a blanket over her face. Damn.

Parents and relatives began arriving. It had happened pretty close to town, and the information had gotten out even before the hospital staff had had a chance to call them. Their presence, while accepted by everybody as a right, did confuse and complicate things sometimes.

I noticed that Pastor Rothberg was among the arrivals. Not surprising, as clergy were frequently either notified by the hospital or requested by family members. That was good. The clergy help a lot in cases like this.

I waved at him and he waved back. We were too far apart to speak, and there were lots of intervening people.

About fifteen minutes later, I wandered out to the parking lot and pulled my baseball cap out of my car. Air Care would be getting close, and I would have to help Dan keep people back. The problem was, we’d had ice all over the place about two weeks ago, and they’d sanded the hospital parking lot. Heavily. That was the reason for the cap. We were going to get sandblasted when the chopper set down.

I talked to Dan for a minute, about the wreck. Three of the victims were locals, two were from Minnesota. It was the local who appeared drunk, and both the Minnesota people were now dead.

We heard Air Care before we saw it, because of the hills. Dan contacted them on his portable and advised the lot was clear. We turned on our top lights—one car at each end of the landing area, to give him an aiming point. The pilot was pretty concerned about the winds at ground level. We told him not more than five knots, from the northwest.

“Must be pretty windy up there,” said Dan.

The chopper was an Alouette III, small but sleek. The pilot set it down gently, after taking the skin off my face with sand from the parking lot. The nurse jumped out and
headed for the ER, followed by another one, while the pilot shut things off.

Dan and I were just standing there, watching to make sure no bystander screwed with the chopper, when I heard a voice behind me. It was Pastor Rothberg.

“A wonderful thing, a wonderful thing.” He paused, and we both looked at the helicopter. “I was wondering, uh, how you’re coming with that matter we discussed at your house the other day.”

I turned to look at him. “Pretty well.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

Something had been nagging at me since Hester had talked to us. Sort of working on me all through the accident and while I was cooling my heels at the hospital. I still didn’t know just what it was, but I was getting the definite impression that Pastor Rothberg was somebody to talk with. Like I’ve said before, I’m famous for partial thoughts. And nagging myself.

“Look, when we’re done here, why don’t we just chat about it? I need to talk to somebody about some of these things, and you seem to know a bit about it.”

“I’d be glad to. Just let me tell my wife, so she can get a ride home?”

“Sure,” I said. He turned and went to an older station wagon. I’d never met his wife. She got out of the car, and I got a good look at her. A little above medium height, light hair, about thirty or so. Slender, with a woebegone expression. Thin face. Pastor’s wives suffer, too, I guess, but in a different way. I walked over to them.

“I hate to take your husband away from you,” I said.

She smiled. “That’s fine. I’m used to it.”

“Dear,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Deputy Carl Houseman. Carl, my wife, Betty.”

She extended her hand, and I shook it. Felt frail. Small hands.

“Carl, Mark told me he had quite a conversation with you the other day. Remarkable.”

Remarkable how? That he’d had an interesting conversation with a cop? Remarkable that he’d told her? Or remarkable subject matter? How do you tell?

“Well, the most remarkable thing was probably my coffee,” I said, smiling.

“Doesn’t your wife teach?”

Subject effectively changed. Good. Maybe she was really discreet. That would be nice, if he had told her much about what we had talked about.

Small talk for a minute or two, and then people started to move from the ER to the chopper. First, the pilot, then the attendants, with a couple of EMTs and Henry pushing a gurney with a well-wrapped victim on it. IVs dangling, portable oxygen in a pack. We were all watching, but I noticed that Betty was even paler than before.

They loaded the victim, cranked up the chopper, and I had to go back to work.

The takeoff was neat, as we have high-tension wires all over the place, and this guy went straight up for about a hundred feet. Fun to watch them rotate about their vertical axis and then move off. I’d have to ask Lamar if I could have one.

One of the X-ray techs was leaving, and apparently knew Betty, because she had no difficulty in getting a ride.

Rothberg and I went back into the hospital. As I went by the ER, Henry told me he could get the blood now.

I went to my little rest area and picked up the forms and the Vacutainer kit and took it to him. Just took a few seconds to advise the suspect of his options under the implied-consent law and have the blood withdrawn. I put my package under my arm and went looking for Mark. He was near the end of the hall by the conference room door, talking to the mother of the guy I’d just taken blood from. As I approached, she gave me a dirty look. That’s okay, lady, I thought. If he’s drunk, and they’re both dead, he’s looking at a lot more than DWI. How do you think the
parents of the dead feel? But I didn’t say anything of the sort.

“Ma’am,” I said. “Mark, if I could talk to you, when you get a minute …” Give him an out. Surprisingly, he took it.

We sat at the conference room table, and I liberated a couple of cups of hospital coffee. Yucch.

“Your wife seemed to be having a hard time with the victim,” I said. “She know her?”

“No,” said Mark. “We were at the driver’s parents’ for supper when the call came. We don’t really know the girl. But it does upset her, seeing people hurt like that.”

“I suppose so. Especially when it’s so unnecessary.”

“Yes, it’s the innocent victims …”

“Well”—I might as well test the waters—“you should talk to the detective we have out here from New York. He knows a lot about Satanism, too.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, sort of an expert on it. He got here the other day, the state requested him. On loan.”

“Oh. Well, you know, I’ve been hearing a lot about this case, from my congregation, mostly. Especially since the funerals. They’re a little upset about burying the victims in our cemetery, of course.”

They are, are they? I thought. Seems to me you were, too.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“God’s mercy is extended to all, even to those who may not think they’re serving him.”

“That’s good.”

“We’re all God’s children, Carl. Although even I tend to overlook that once in a while.”

An apology? Possibly.

“We all do.”

“Yes. But we’re all his children. Even if we stray, or are taken over by evil. It may be against our will, at least at
first. We tend to become occupied with the corporeal side and not be as forgiving as we should.”

Henry walked in.

“Can I join this club?” He got his coffee and sat down.

“We were just talking about the murders, sort of,” I said. “Mark here is something of an expert on the occult.”

Henry raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Oh, no, not really,” said Mark. “But we had an incident at our last congregation, in Ohio, where there were some Satanic overtones. I learned a little by counseling some people.”

“Yeah,” I volunteered. “Didn’t you have some kid kill himself, or something like that?”

“Yes. It was tragic. He was a good young man, from a good family. I counseled a friend of his, who was also involved in the occult at the time.” He looked at Henry. “That’s how I know so much about it, I guess. I had to research Satanism, to argue him away.”

Henry asked the next question for me.

“My little brother lives in Ohio, near Dayton. Were you in Dayton?”

“No,” said Rothberg. “A small town called Elyria. Nice place. We were in Dayton, once, to the air force museum at Wright-Patterson. Have you ever been there?”

That got us all going on another tangent, as we were all interested in airplanes, and I’ve always wanted to go there myself. But before I got too involved, I wrote Elyria on the top of the implied-consent folder. Small letters. Like I was finishing up my notes.

It was a little after midnight when I got back to the office. Nobody around except two reserve officers and Sally. On the worst shift, of course. Hazel Willis was the chief dispatcher and made out the schedule. She hated Sally.

I went into the kitchen and put on a fresh pot of coffee. Stood around making small talk with the reserves. When the coffee was done, I got a cup, and so did they. I took a cup to Sally.

I hesitated. “Hey, listen, I’m gonna need something done, and I want it kept totally between you and me for now. Absolutely.”

“Sure.”

“Thing is, I’m not sure what it’s going to be. Not exactly.”

“All right.” She looked bemused. “But I want you to do a DL request on Mark Rothberg.”

“The pastor?”

“That’s right.”

“Sure, got his date of birth?”

I grinned. “Of course not.”

She turned to the teletype terminal. “Just give me a minute.”

The reserve officers chose that moment to wander into the dispatch center. They were bored. All well and good, but I sure as hell didn’t want them to know I was even checking on Pastor Rothberg. If I was wrong … Sally killed the screen, and the four of us talked for a minute. About the traffic accident, mostly.

I sort of herded them into the back office with me, to let Sally finish her checks. She called on the intercom a few minutes later.

“I’ve got that stuff from the accident,” she said.

“I’ll be right out.”

The reserves, by this time, were firmly ensconced in the back room. Discussing the wrecks they’d been to in the past. They wouldn’t miss me for at least a couple of minutes.

Sally had Mark Rothberg’s DL information up on the screen. She handed me the hard copy.

“Need anything else?”

“As a matter of fact …”

I had her get all vehicles registered to him. That was quick, now that we had his DOB and operator’s license number. Then I had her run a registration check on all three vehicles. One of them, the station wagon, was in his and his wife’s name.

In Iowa, the Social Security number of each registered owner is attached to the vehicle registration information.

“Run his wife’s SSN, get a DL on her. Then do an NCIC check on both of them, Triple I. Then do a check through Ohio, the state police, or whatever they’re called. Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll have a little more.” NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, and a Triple I stands for the Interstate Identification Index. Access to it is restricted, of course.

“What about the logging?”

A problem, if you wanted things kept quiet. The requirements were that all NCIC checks for criminal records be logged, with the name of the subject, inquiry date, and identity of both the officer requesting the information and the dispatcher who ran it. The logbook was at the console, and anybody who worked for us could look at it and see who had been checked on.

“Keep a log yourself … hide it here. I’ll clear it with Lamar later.”

“Well, all right …” She looked worried. If I screwed this one up, she could be suspended.

“Don’t worry.”

“Sure.”

I went back to the reserve’s coffee klatch and talked with them for a while longer. Just to keep them out of the dispatch center while Sally was working on my project.

A few minutes later, she called again.

“Yeah.”

“Got it.”

“Okay, anything?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Listen, now run those names through the PD in Cleveland, Ohio. Administrative message, to their intelligence unit, if possible. And get a PBX number for them, would you?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

The reserves were looking at me a little strangely. They were very much aware that that sort of teletype traffic had nothing to do with any accidents.

“DCI’s got me running some routine checks on some people,” I said. “Give it to the night shift … we’re too busy to do it during the day,” I mimicked.

They agreed. They’d seen that before. Good.

“Look, guys, I’m gonna have to go into Lamar’s office for a while, to make those phone calls. Nothing personal, but you know how it is.”

They did. They decided to walk around the building again, just to have something to do.

That was one thing about our reserves. They nearly always got the most boring duty we had, but they never complained. Not once. They were as dedicated as the rest of us, if not more so.

I went into Lamar’s office and shut the door. Called Sally and told her that I was on a different comm line. To call me there, when she had my information from Cleveland.

Then I sat back in Lamar’s chair and just thought about the ramifications of my line of inquiry.

There were two reasons for my secrecy regarding the checking. First, I didn’t want anybody else to jump to conclusions before I was reasonably sure of what I was doing. Second, I didn’t want to look stupid in front of the whole group if I was wrong. And what I seemed to be suggesting seemed a little outrageous. Even to me.